An extremely rare bird is dazzling the internet with its bright and beautiful feathers.

Charlie Stephenson, a resident of Alabaster, Alabama told AL.com she first noticed the bird at her bird feeder in January.

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"I thought 'Well there's a bird I've never seen before,'" Stephenson said. "Then I realized it was a cardinal, and it was a yellow cardinal."

Jeremy Black Photography

Auburn University biology professor Geoffrey Hill said the bird carries a genetic mutation that causes its normally bright red feathers to instead be a brilliant shade of yellow.

Hill said the mutation is so rare that he has never seen one in person.

"I've been birdwatching in the range of cardinals for 40 years and I've never seen a yellow bird in the wild," Hill said. "I would estimate that in any given year there are two or three yellow cardinals at backyard feeding stations somewhere in the U.S. or Canada."

"There are probably a million bird feeding stations in that area so very very roughly, yellow cardinals are a one in a million mutation," he said.

Jeremy Black, a professional photographer who is friends with Stephenson, saw she posted about the bird on Facebook and asked if he could come over to try and photograph it.

On Feb. 19, Black snapped the shot of a lifetime after about five hours of waiting.

Jeremy Black Photography

"I started out sitting in her backyard hoping that maybe I would see it. A lot of cardinals came by and none of them were yellow, so I decided to be a little bit more evasive and hide on her screened-in porch. About two or three hours after I moved to the porch, it finally showed up," he said.

Black now hopes to get a picture of a yellow cardinal and a red cardinal sitting on a branch together.